Dear David, your question on phoneme confusion is certainly very interesting. I suggest having a look at Stilp&Kluender’s 2010 PNAS paper [1], which first discusses the importance of consonants vs. vowels to speech intelligibility, and then suggests that such linguistic constructs should be abandoned in favor of sensory measures. More specifically, the authors evaluated the impact of replacing selected portions of the speech signal with 1/f noise. A measure of the degree of change in the signal over time (which the authors term “cochlea-scaled entropy”) best predicted which signal portions were most critical to preserving speech intelligibility. More recently, the cochlea-scaled entropy measure was also used to decide which speech portions to re-time around (known) fluctuating maskers, successfully increasing overall intelligibility [2]. However, I am not aware of studies that investigated distortions consisting of switching certain phonemes to other perceptually nearby phonemes, as you suggest. Kind regards, Raphael [1] Stilp, C. E. & Kluender, K. R. Cochlea-scaled entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 12387–92 (2010). URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2901476 [2] Aubanel, V. & Cooke, M. Information-preserving temporal reallocation of speech in the presence of fluctuating maskers. in Proc. Interspeech 3592–3596 (2013). URL: http://laslab.org/upload/information-preserving_temporal_reallocation_of_speech_in_the_presence_of_fluctuating_maskers.pdf -- Raphael Ullmann Ph.D. Candidate Idiap Research Institute Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne On 15.08.2014, at 06:59, David Klein <kleinsound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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